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The waterway "like a gigantic aquatic bridge" gets its due in the opening, which notes the pith-helmeted commander teeing off from the deck and recognizes Sternberg's allegorical dredge (The Salvation Hunters). The Canal Zone Company president doubles as governor, toll fees don't balance the budget like they used to, imperialism being among other things a lousy investment. ("You may have to take up tourism.") America away from America, transplanted families in a diorama of surreal blandness. Evangelical patriotism is the coin of the realm, drills and benedictions and parades ad nauseam, down to the distant bugle that gets tennis players to put down rackets and stand at attention. Supermarkets and bingo parlors and homemade fashion shows fill the simulacrum, an air of anxiety nevertheless drifts into sundry counseling sessions. "We're worried about... are we gonna be here next year, are we going to have a revolution, that sort of thing. It's a little stressful." Pious colonizers under a glass dome, a bicentennial vision by Frederick Wiseman. The Yank self-image and its mundane bizarreries, tended to by locals glimpsed as shadows in their own land. A military disc-jockey announces the theater schedule (The Passenger is sandwiched between Walking Tall Part 2 and The Happy Hooker), a ham-radio vet years to "drown worms, tell lies, swat flies" back home. Abbott and Costello dubbed on a mental institution telly, a police dog licking itself before the network camera. Communication 202 at the "marriage enrichment workshop," middle-aged Boy Scouts presenting each other with Silver Beaver medallions, like nothing so much as McCarey's Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! Wiseman's wry editing moves from zoo to barbecue, from a high-school graduation to a sky dotted with paratroopers. The capper finds the native cleaning the graveyard after the invader's medley of anthems, a nightmare Ford procession wrapped with a desolate Tati view. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |